But before he was half-way to London he felt that he had been rather foolish and quixotic in not having told her simply and practically what his mother’s opposition meant.  She must learn it some day; better from him than others.  His mother, indeed, might tell her in the letter she had threatened to write.  But he thought not.  Nobody was more loftily secret as to business affairs than Lady Lucy; money might not have existed for the rare mention she made of it.  No; she would base her opposition on other grounds.

These reflections brought him back to earth, and to the gloomy pondering of the situation.  Half a million!—­because of the ill-doing of a poor neurotic woman—­twenty years ago!

It filled him with a curious resentment against Juliet Sparling herself, which left him still more out of sympathy with Diana’s horror and grief.  It must really be understood, when they married, that Mrs. Sparling’s name was never to be mentioned between them—­that the whole grimy business was buried out of sight forever.

And with a great and morbid impatience he shook the recollection from him.  The bustle of Whitehall, as he drove down it, was like wine in his veins; the crowd and the gossip of the Central Lobby, as he pressed his way through to the door of the House of Commons, had never been so full of stimulus or savor.  In this agreeable, exciting world he knew his place; the relief was enormous; and, for a time, Marsham was himself again.

* * * * *

Sir James Chide came in the late afternoon; and in her two hours with him, Diana learned, from lips that spared her all they could, the heart-breaking story of which Fanny had given her but the crudest outlines.

The full story, and its telling, taxed the courage both of hearer and speaker.  Diana bore it, as it seemed to Sir James, with the piteous simplicity of one in whose nature grief had no pretences to overcome.  The iron entered into her soul, and her quick imagination made her torment.  But her father had taught her lessons of self-conquest, and in this first testing of her youth she did not fail.  Sir James was astonished at the quiet she was able to maintain, and touched to the heart by the suffering she could not conceal.

Nothing was said of his own relation to her mother’s case; but he saw that she understood it, and their hearts moved together.  When he rose to take his leave she held his hand in hers with such a look in her eyes as a daughter might have worn; and he, with an emotion to which he gave little outward expression, vowed to himself that henceforward she should lack no fatherly help or counsel that he could give her.

He gathered, with relief, that the engagement persisted, and the perception led him to praise Marsham in a warm Irish way.  But he could not find anything hopeful to say of Lady Lucy.  “If you only hold to each other, my dear young lady, things will come right!” Diana flushed and shrank a little, and he felt—­helplessly—­that the battle was for their fighting, and not his.